A Saving Face

You’d have to have been vacationing on Venus not to notice that something quite cataclysmic is happening to public Christianity. There are the doings and sayings of Pope Francis and now a rumble of unhappy murmurs about his populist style and broad-minded language, going all the way to full-blown right-wing questioning of his orthodoxy (“Francis is founding a new religion, opposed to the Catholic magisterium.")

This is a story that’s going to run and run, given the structural faults afflicting the traditional patriarchate of the West. Aside from the anomaly of two popes who seem to operate as colleagues or equals, there are the open wounds of the role of women in that organization; and then there is the way the method of mass communication, which has always been the forte of the R.C. church, is now upstaged by the universal effect of social media. The Vatican may have a Twitter account but half a billion others have one too. There can be little doubt that the R.C. church is on a crisis search for its identity, and that search can only have two opposed outcomes: on the one side a fresh opting for rigid vertical control, on the other a radically devolved, local and perhaps newly prophetic organization.

But it’s across the pond, in both the geographical and denominational senses, that perhaps the greatest drama lies. The Protestant Reformation established “the freedom of the Christian man” producing a revolutionary new basis for relationship to God. Within the sanctum of the soul a contract was forged in the blood of Christ and in consequence nothing could shake the fortress of the justified self. Allied to the ruggedness of the American landscape this “justification” produced the classic U.S. phenomenon of extreme Christian individualism. It has now reached monstrous proportions in what is known as Dominionism, a belief system underpinning the current shut-down in government and threat of debt default.

The prospect of a small group of zealots bringing the whole world to its knees is nothing new, but what’s different is that this could happen in the name of Jesus. No matter he said "blessed are the peacemakers," threatening economic collapse and, with that, the possibility of further wars channeling the resulting frustrations, all is warranted to bring about his kingdom. Nevertheless, this could well be a decisive overreach.

It is through such extreme moments in history—when the violence of a movement is fully revealed—that profound shifts take place. In this case the ferocious cancer that Christian individualism has become is now showing itself clearly, and the journey out of this false construct will become an exodus.

Many more will join the "nones," the religiously unaffiliated who are on the rise in the U.S., especially among the under thirties. But others will continue to search, and the place of promise they may well reach will be a revolutionary new sense of self not founded in individualism but deeply linked to others. Contemporary mirror theory of the self, based in mimesis and mirror neurons, has brought an entirely new intellectual ground for Christian identity, one that is much more consistent with the Sermon on the Mount. The philosopher Merleau-Ponty anticipated the phenomenology of these developments when he said "I live in the facial expression of the other, as I feel him living in mine.” We are wired directly and visually to each other, producing the possibility of jealousy and violence, but also of peace. Jesus is the one who created the possibility of genuine new humanity in imitation of his face of radical forgiveness and love. The key thing is that this is not simply a reflective or moral imitation but one that goes to the root of our being in a primary imitation.

An example would be Jesus' teaching of turning the other cheek: exactly as I adjust my face before my enemy's attack, his own face and self are brought to live within a world of nonviolence. And if my face can transform the existence of my enemy, how much more will sisters and brothers in communion do so for each other? But the very first face at the origin of all these transformations is that of Christ himself. “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3:18)

Empathy, therefore, is the new medium of saving grace, rather than law and the isolated self. Because of our deeply human power of immediate imitation we are enabled to live in the transformed face of the Christ. And here is the real change in contemporary Christianity: from the supreme individual to self-and-other in communion.

 

 

Tony Bartlett

JESUALITY

JESUALITY

 

The following are summary notes of the presentation to begin the Wood Hath Hope course in spirituality (10.4.13).

In the past spirituality has been understood in Greek terms: spirit as a separate and separable part of the self which does not belong to the material universe. Because our spiritual experience is borderless and invisible—it puts us in felt intimate connection with things other than ourselves and very often we cannot see, we quickly believe there is another realm to reality, an immaterial one. The classic instance of this is death and the dead. It is very hard for us to disconnect from our deceased parents and ancestors, because they are so much part of our memories and who we are. They continue to receive a life from us as the mimetic "other." This spiritual realm was made intellectual and structural in Platonic thought. By making the realm of death also the realm of intellect (the world of eternal or heavenly truth) the die was cast on the meaning of spiritual in the West.

But today contemporary thought is showing how we are connected to each other and indeed the whole universe by means of material imitation.

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Babies as young as 36 hours, and even 42 minutes, can be seen to imitate facial gestures. There are more than two dozen accepted studies of early infant imitation. (See "Mimesis and Science," Scott Garrels, 58-59: "exteroception" and "proprioception" use the same code, they are "bound together at birth.") This means we perceive ourselves at the same time and by the same means as we perceive others.

And if our first meaningful world is our mother then forever after our perception of the world will have a personal sense. This explains the constant response in people, “Why me?” when something goes wrong, or “Someone up there likes me” if they go right. This also explains the Girardian thesis that natural disasters become the occasions for community crises in which someone is mythically blamed. It's very difficult not see things in personal-meaningful terms.

Showing of PBS informational short on mirror neurons at http://video.pbs.org/video/1615173073/

All this means there is something spiritual about our root imitation code. Or rather, our neural coding is the spiritual: I am you, and you are me, and I have a self-other relation to the whole world. Neural receptors, therefore, are not material in the usual sense, located in one spot and one sequence of causes. They belong also to the other, the other human. They are effectively in two places at once and are so from our birth. A 42 minute old baby couldn’t possibly judge and decide the other human face was important to imitate. It is already logged into the other before it opened its eyes for the first time. Think about a child’s eye, a neonate, the way it seeks you out and uploads you, receives you, it means we are internally programmed for and to the other, or the other already is us. In the past this would have been called an immortal soul which already knows eternal truth, coming to earth and recognizing stuff it already knows. But from a science point of view we have simple dual function neurons, you move I move. In fact at the earliest stage you and I are not differentiated enough to say "you" or "I", it’s  really a “we move” thing. Effectively an electronic discharge of energy does not switch on inside of me until an external source tells it to do so. Part of my electronic/chemical structure is coded to something other than myself. Like a photoelectric sensor switches when it sees a shadow etc. it switches. Except this shadow is highly specific and complex, matching the complexity of the human sensor.

If this is the case then empathy is foundational: “self-other connectedness” exists at birth. Empathy is the word we use for the continuing power of this connection. According to Iacoboni there is a connection between mirror neurons and the limbic system, i.e. our emotions also switch on when we imitate the other. This explains the power of the other to move us emotionally, and especially the way compassion is activated by another's vulnerability. See Iacoboni, "Mirroring People" 119.

The point then is that the soul is not a separate part of the human being. The body is the soul, the soul is the body, in its neural complexity. What does this mean then for "salvation"? The soul is not a commodity, an item I possess, to be saved by some kind of a deal, like personal property or privilege. Instead it is the way I interact with others.  That’s the issue.

My global interactions, their sum or totality, is what is governed by religion, with God as the final authority of this spiritual order. But Christianity does not start with God, it really starts with a man. If we learn the totality of this man’s responses and above all his final response on the cross, then our humanity is saved. It becomes radically human.  And this is not something we do, but something we receive from the Christ.

Christianity also has Holy Spirit, a discovery of the first church through empathy with the Crucified and Risen one. It is both a human event and a divine Spirit, a tuning of the neural human to the frequency of God, so we become functionally one. “The Spirit testifies with our spirit…” (Rom 8:16).

Glossalalia is a great illustration. I am not sure if it surfaced before in other communal religious contexts. Effectively in the New Testament it means the connections, the strings or relays of verbal meaning have been completely scrambled by the impact of Jesus, resolving into a raw sound giving expression to new human meaning. Instead of old meaning originated in violence, a completely new order of human meaning is born.

Through Jesus we are imitating a God whom we can only discover through this imitation. If and when you imitate perfectly is there a difference in kind? There is in fact adoption to the nature of God. But this is happening at the cellular level!

John’s gospel sets the emphasis on the "word made flesh," not salvation. A word is a unique event of human neural processing, in a chain with other words. When I say “tree” a whole series of images and associations are let loose inside your head, all connected at one remove or another to our total view of the world. Words are world and they are learned along with mother’s milk. My son's first word was "draw" because that contained the world for him. We have interpreted John's "In the beginning was the word" in absolute metaphysical terms, i.e. the divine logos/word. This may indeed be valid, but it’s also valid to see it in simple human terms—this is the "word" that changes all our human meaning. It’s the new holistic language we are asked to learn in imitation of Jesus' new human/divine meaning. It is the new way of being human in a humanly constructed world, reconstructed by Jesus.

 

 

 

 

The Gospel of Immediacy

When I was a young man my father gave me a pre-paid credit card. The card had a considerable amount of funds on it, not exactly stated, and there was always the suggestion more funds could be added. The only thing was I had to activate it. And yet I was not told where or how to do this. The only instruction: I had to keep trying!

Of course, as you’ve guessed, it’s a parable.

All the places I’ve been, all the organizations and institutions I’ve been attached to have been trial and error, trying to phone in that card. I think there are many other people who are given the same unsettling, perhaps terrible gift, and are engaged in finding the way to release the funds.

So what are the funds? What is that vast sum of money?

It is the content of the gospel, its power to set us free, unpacked in a new way for a new time. It is the dramatically new thing brought by Jesus, finding its dramatic contemporary reading.

 

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The metaphysical content of Christianity is dead. It may perhaps be true, in its own way, as a way of understanding our universe, and even perhaps be intellectually unavoidable. But in terms of how it communicates to our contemporary world it is dead. An eternal deity, first mover, eternity itself, these are dead and dying concepts. Why?

Because both the world of information and the earth over which it is spread have overtaken our consciousness. Modernity was always an experience of the world for its own sake, but the coming of the Internet, of portable devices, and the constantly evolving visual and narrative effects of movies and TV, they have brought us face to face with ourselves in unprecedented immediacy.  At the same time, the human living space, the earth, is under visible stress, with floods, droughts, winds, hunger, new viruses, and continual war and economic crisis thrown in.

As a symbol producing species our spiritual framework is now radically different. All the old symbols are still around and they have their followers, but a new symbolic condition grips the human imagination. If symbols act to gather meaning for us then a smart phone, a computer screen and T.V. screen are themselves effectively symbolic: they speak to us immediately of human immediacy. If a city experiences unprecedented heatwave or the rise of unemployment and poverty, then that becomes a problem not only for those who live there, but for everyone, because one way or another we feel the effect. Either the social and political repercussions seek us out, or once again our means of communication involve us humanly with what is happening.

And we understand why.

For right in the middle of this new symbolic universe there comes a science of human relationships which forcefully underlines our immediacy to each other. Mimetic theory and the discovery of mirror neurons tell us that we not only empathize but empathy is the ground of meaning itself. It is the primary medium of communication, including both violence and symbolism. There is not, therefore, a separable “spiritual” soul carrying our meaning, but our bodies are themselves “soullish,” generating our possibilities of meaning in and with each other, all the time.

Symbolism even as it shows us contemporary immediacy is shown to be rooted in immediacy. Not only is the world in our face, the world is our face!

When therefore Jesus is crucified that does not happen to satisfy the wrath of an eternal god standing on his eternal dignity, but to teach us at the heart of human immediacy a totally different way to be present to others, especially to those who are enemies. Rather than starting at the top, we start at the bottom. Rather than looking to the hereafter we look to the here and now. Rather than starting with violence as an eternal given, we start with the gift of love as a discovery in time. 

This is the contemporary drama of the gospel within a new symbolic order of human immediacy.

And that’s where the money is!

 

Tony Bartlett

Undamming The Stream Of Jesus' Semiotics!

I just got back from the 2013 Cov&r conference in Iowa (Colloquium on Violence & Religion). At one point there was a Eucharist, to celebrate James Alison's 25th anniversary of priestly ordination and to commemorate the life of a Cov&r founder, Bob Hamerton-Kelly, recently passed away. With these insistent motives I felt pushed to attend mass, a possibility I had not entertained since my reaction to the revised language of the canon experienced last summer.

I could not undergo again the sacral metaphysics represented by those changed words, those regressive signs. But the moment I entered the University of Northern Iowa campus church I felt touched by a tranquil pang of recognition. Like a scent you have not gotten for years and years, loaded with deep and rich connection.

Classically you could say "That was so weird, I really have no idea where it came from." But in fact I think I do know. Later I returned to the church, to sit in silence and sift through my feelings and thoughts. I understood that what touched me was the church's semiotic stream or flood. And by "church" I mean here both the actual building and the larger institution.

The actual building was well designed with warm red brick and abundant muted light. There were a number of large Byzantine icons scattered around, their flat two-dimensional scheme filled with circular motion, leading the eye and brain in an abyssal space of endless giving. The sacrament was to the side, an understated, materially eloquent witness. And those were just the most evident of the signs and symbols at play.

Here then is what was happening. The Roman Catholic church is a semiotic ocean or stream going back in essence to the signs performed by Jesus--both the obvious ones, the "miracles," but just as important the word-pictures he used and the dramatic performance of the meal "the night before he died," with its nonsacrificial food elements, bread and wine.  (To understand this more you could do worse than check the last two chapters of Virtually Christian!)

At any rate it is clear that Jesus left behind a transformed and transformative linguistics grounded in his own absolute reimagining and remaking of relational human life. Because of their gripping power of meaning it was all too easy, within the actually existing world, to twist these linguistics into a imperial structure. Once a crowd is gathered around these signs then certain individuals--whose roles were themselves meant only as signs--could claim legal possession and control and institute lines of power and exclusion.

But by definition a language can have no borders. Signs by nature belong to every human brain (surely the internet shows us this!) Thus part of the present crisis of the R.C. church is its inability to retain exclusive title to its semiotic universe, its weaker and weaker claims to ownership.

The present pope, Francis, is himself an extraordinary sign: he is the first "collegial pope" sharing the office with the "pope emeritus" Benedict. In Francis the vertical papacy has already become horizontal. He also likes to use striking figures of speech. Earlier this year, talking about the ointment or oil used for the sick, itself a sign, he encouraged priests to go out to the "outskirts," the margins, the places where people are suffering in order to bring an anointing in a wider sense. He said, "The ointment is not intended just to make us fragrant, much less to be kept in a jar, for then it would become rancid … and the heart bitter.”

But the whole church has become a closed-up jar, running the constant risk of making its contents rancid. If Francis is serious about his words about anointing, then the walls of the church need deliberately to be broken open and its semiotic stream released to the world, so the world may be healed. The church needs to renounce imperial ownership of its universe of signs, allowing that revolutionary wealth to run like wells fountaining up in each local situation for and in itself.

The semiotic stream I experienced sitting in that church is a transforming semiotics of human nonviolence. That is unmistakable. But by imprisoning that meaning within church walls the world is allowed to continue on its way, and that must be part of the contract the imperial church has made with the world. Yet the world is crying out now for the new language of Jesus. Come on, Francis, break down the walls, undam the stream of Jesus' semiotics!


Tony Bartlett

A New U.S. Religion

A new, nonviolent Christianity is breaking forth on the native soil of the U.S. Nonviolent both in practice and intrinsic theology. It will shine out like apple blossom in May!

Why is it possible to say this? Because there is no other place on earth so equally soaked in violence and the writings of the New Testament! The future here has nowhere to go, except more of one or the other, and probably of both. In biblical-historical terms, the Spirit of God chooses specific moments for aspects of God's work to come to clarity; and we are here in one of them. The present moment constitutes a "great emergence", as Phyllis Tickle calls it, a five-hundred year shake-up. I'm also claiming that it takes shape not simply as a style or sensibility, but specifically in terms of a theology of nonviolence. It will have its own authentic ecclesial expression, and it will renew the ancient churches.

The present near impossibility of US politics is one pointer. The extreme ideological divide around the nature of freedom, of humanity, of the U.S. constitution, results in gridlock in Washington, interspersed with wars of choice and endless extra-judicial drone-killings of those who are counted guilty simply by the fact they're killed. The resulting situation is spiritually toxic at a critical level, whether people think about it or not. Anyone who takes Christianity seriously is driven to a new searching of scripture, simply to detox.

Another indicator is the guns. The romance of the gun in the U.S. has morphed into a monster. The power of automatic weapons puts the immense sanction of the state into the hands of individuals, deciding in an instant the final rights and character of human existence. By means of the gun the trope of the individual has advanced to a twisted Augustinian god: sole, self-justifying, beyond appeal. It is now a spiritual disease which can only be cast out by seeking the more powerful nonviolence of Jesus.

A positive indicator is the stirring of the evangelical churches. The emergent and missional movement is out there looking for its soul. Theologians like Brian McClaren and Rob Bell push in the direction of nonviolence, but a conscious theology has not fully percolated to become a core evangelical theme.

What is world-changing and dangerous and essentially Christian is nonretaliation, and love and forgiveness of enemies. Nonviolence arises from Christianity's deepest self, from the deepest self of the Crucified and Risen One. And it amounts to the new humanity, which is the eschatological plan and in-breaking of God.
 

Christian faith now is nothing less than this, and it can be learned only in a face-to-face group continually rehearsing the nonviolence of the Gospel as both teaching and life. At the same time it can affect and change the established churches--but only along this route.

Real evolution only takes place at the level of the cell, the single, small cell. Organisms as such cannot evolve. New organisms arise because of the new, transformative cell. This is true at both the biological and ecclesial levels. However, it may also be true, in a framework of social evolution, that established organizations can mimic and change under the influence of new ones. This is Tickle's point: the Counter Reformation among Roman Catholics imitated the Reform of Protestantism. But first there must be the new cells!

And today these cells of a new Christian humanity are indeed emerging and once they come fully to light the ancient churches may learn this new meaning--of their traditional existence!

The apple blossom can be seen! The voice of the dove is heard in the land!

Tony Bartlett

The U.S. Crisis

I have never quite felt a sense in the U.S. like the one I experienced last week. The U.S. crisis is not fiscal, political, military, or even cultural in any usual sense. It's as profound and hard-to-name as it is evident; like some strange tropical illness with which a relative is suffering, and nobody can seem to stop it.

Founding a nation on "self-evident truths" must always be a risky business let alone when those truths claim the equality of all people. Generally speaking equality will be either a recipe for satisfaction or for constantly renewed conflict. Perhaps the real truth of the matter is that U.S. "equality" was always based, in uneasy parts, on a mutual measure of Christian individual salvation and a huge continent in which such saved individuals could lose (and find) themselves. The 2010 movie, True Grit, and the book it is based on, are convincing depictions of the cultural marriage of these two factors, with the gun as the great settler of scores against both backdrops. Now, for better or worse, both the ideology of Christian salvation and the open horizons of migration are eroded. We are left staring more and more fixedly at each other, yet more than ever armed.

The horror of Sandy Hook and the barely less horrific response of the NRA, made public a week after the shootings, brought day-to-day U.S. society almost to a spiritual halt; or at least to a kind of moment of clarity. As if the fever (our own fever) cleared just enough for a moment, for us to recognize the true character of the crisis.

A twenty-year-old man named Adam entered an elementary school and for every one of his own wretched, miscarried years he slaughtered a first-grade child with an automatic rifle, shooting each child between three and eleven times. Having previously killed his mother, he also killed six adults at the school, finally shooting himself. The cold mathematical fury of his actions combined with the extreme youth, vulnerability and innocence of his targets, plus his own rabbit-in-the-headlights-look in the photos available, managed to exceed by an order of magnitude the shock of all the previous mass shootings in the U.S.

The U.S. love-affair with guns slammed with the force literally of a bullet into its much greater love-affair with kids. There were calls at once for increased gun-controls, led by the President who declared "words need to lead to action" and directed the Vice-President to head an interagency effort, coming up with answers to the issue of mass shootings.

Such controls seem to be simple common sense--and do so to many NRA members--but the response by the NRA leadership demonstrates that there is something greater in play here than common sense. Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre called for armed guards in every U.S. school, fingered "mental health" as the culprit, and uttered the eternally classic line, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

This kind of vision implies a complete breakdown of the idea of civil society, in a dystopian one-for-one mirroring of the violence of the lone shooter which the supposed intent is to counter. Those who carried lethal weapons in ancient city states from Canaan to Greece to Verona and Venice always belonged to the warrior class, the aristoi (from which comes aristocrats), those who were "best" in a variety of fields, above all fighting. The ordinary populace, tradespeople, and peasantry in the fields, may have had weapons stashed away but they did not carry them. (Hence the biblical "meek of the earth," as in psalm 37:11 and Job 24:4.) That way, violence was reserved to a special class, those who were, you might say, professionals in the field, and then also the soldiery which developed around them. Modern police are largely in fact a product of the time when aristocrats gave up carrying weapons and keeping beside them groups of armed retainers. What LaPierre is, therefore, talking about is a level of near-universal (re)arming never seen before in human history: armed guards at every corner and concealed-carry on the part of numerous others, together with weapons whose lethality is unparalleled. The NRA is talking about a steady state of civil war where you're never sure who or what the enemy is or whether the next moment will be your last. A Christian mutuality of individuals has been sundered apart into an original violence, and equality in violence becomes the final measure of a man (or woman).

This is the crisis we're facing. You could call it a spiritual crisis, except "spiritual" seems normally to refer to a separate realm of spirit which only secondarily has concrete consequences. You should perhaps then call it anthropological, because that indicates how we concretely structure our humanity. Most of all you could call it "Christian" because the half-born message of the gospel in the West has brought us to this decayed and dangerous form of equality, a kind of zombie Christianity filled with violent atomization and atomizing violence. This form of equality has lost all sense of solidarity with the next man or woman, completely unwilling to trust them for ordinary business of life. It has been replaced instead with a war of all against all, a long slow bleeding war which has already been engaged in many minds.

As Girard says it, "(T)he Western world is in a perpetual state of crisis, and the crisis is always spreading." (Violence and the Sacred, 238)

In these circumstances the Christian message is called to take on a powerfully renewed self-understanding. Because it was a version of Christian belief that helped put the crisis in place it is only a re-imagined and re-vitalized Christianity can help resolve it. First, then, it is urgent that Christian ministers work to transform the basic sense of how Christians think of themselves as humans. Their dominant body/soul anthropology is critically outmoded and is deeply prejudicial against organic human solidarity. Next, violence itself must be taught, not seen on one occasion as a moral aberration, and on another as a magnificent heroism. Rather it is something essentially and horribly human, a kind of spirit or essence itself which has made humanity all that it has known for hundreds of thousands of years. But now this essence has reached an elemental inner crisis because of its exposure to the gospels...being brought literally to light. Because of that light human violence is sweating and blowing up in our faces like dynamite itself. Yet, just as Jesus predicted in the gospel, at the very same time as the human crisis evolves it's also the very time for the "sign of the Son of Man" to appear. That is, the sign of a nonviolent relational humanity, surrendering to each other in love.

This sign and its teaching will be a far surer way of protecting the children than a nine millimeter in every teacher's desk.

Tony Bartlett

P.S. This post is also found on the Theology & Peace website.

First Up

Hi! I'm introducing a new blog, mostly video, that I'll be uploading here. It's not attached to any particular organization, just me, the camera and the shtick... I hope it works and provides a wider platform for some of the thought and vision I'm trying to develop. Oh, by the way,  my name is Tony Bartlett, my last book was Virtually Christian, and I currently also blog on Theology & Peace. Thanks, and peace to you!